Launching a website can be a huge undertaking. A successful launch requires managing many moving parts including content, design, marketing and the technical side. That’s why we have created this handy checklist for you to use on your next website launch or redesign.

And don’t forget, you can get this as an interactive checklist that you and your team can collaborate around. Just create a free account with Process Street and grab it from the examples section.

Check all ‘Hidden Copy’

Check Forms

Fill out the forms on the site and go through the following questions:

Can the flow be improved?

Do you get stuck?

Are the instructions accurate?

Does the completed form get sent to the right people or person?

Proof Read

Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it. There’s always something you’ll pick up on and have to change. See if you can reduce the amount of text by keeping it specific. Break up large text blocks into shorter paragraphs. Add clear headings throughout, and use lists so that users can scan easily. Don’t forget about dynamic text too, such as alert boxes.

Legal Pages are in place

If your site jurisdiction mandates that you have a privacy policy, or a contact us page, ensure you have that in place.

Favicon

The ‘favicon’ appears to the left of the page title in the web browser, and your users will notice if your website doesn’t have one. They give your website credibility and help users navigate to your site when it’s open amongst their other tabs and bookmarks.

Ensuring that your website has a favicon is probably the most basic of any task known to humanity, and yet it’s so frequently overlooked.

Images

404 Pages and Defensive Design

The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist. Get your users back on track by providing a useful 404 page that directs them to the home page or suggests other pages they may be interested in.

Another defensive design technique is checking your forms for validation. Try submitting unusual information in your form fields (e.g. lots of characters, letters in number fields, etc.) and make sure that if there is an error, the user is provided with enough feedback to be able to fix it.

Performance Testing

This is another one of those things that you really should be doing as part of your development process (before and after launch), but it’s never too late to put your website through its paces. Performance can often be optimized by making high value, low effort updates, and changes.

Responsive Testing

Cross Browser Testing

Just when you think your design looks great, pixel perfect, you check it in IE and see that everything is broken. It’s important that your website works across browsers. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems.

Broken Links Testing

It’s one thing to proofread your content, but do yourself (and your users) a huge favor and check that the links in your website go somewhere meaningful — or at least don’t 404.

Again, The W3C have come to the rescue with their W3 Link Checker or Xenu tool. This service crawls your website and looks for broken links. Pro-tip: enter your development URL and see what comes up (though the Link Checker may not work if your development site is locked down).

Now, it should be mentioned that while the Link Checker is super handy, nothing beats going through your site manually, and actually clicking on the links – especially if you’ve built some custom functionality.

Mobile Device Testing

You can use the responsive testing tools mentioned above to do initial mobile testing, but they are not perfect. To really see how your site looks on various mobile devices, you gotta load it up manually.

So use your families, friends, and co-worker’s phones and tablets to see how your site looks. Take screenshots on their devices and email them to yourself if you see any errors.

Set a Launch Date

Give yourself more time than you think, unless you have done this before.

Lead Capture

Capturing leads is arguably the most important thing your website can do. Check you have lead capture in place, and all your forms are working. Make sure test leads are coming through to your CRM.

BONUS: Check your emails are being delivered to all TLDs including Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL. Plus test your emails look good on mobile devices.

SEO

Keyword research: Have you used Google’s Keyword Research Tool? Be sure to consider searcher intent and difficulty, pick 1 keyword per page, and you’ll generally want to start with lower-volume keywords first.

Titles and meta-data: Your page title is the most important element for SEO and is also important so that users know what’s on the page. Make sure it changes on every page and relates to that page’s content.

Are all of your title tags ~65 characters or less? Title tags over this will be truncated in results.

Meta description and keyword tags aren’t as important for SEO (at least for the major search engines anyway), but it’s still a good idea to include them. Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content because this is often what Google displays in its search result description.

<meta name=”description” content=”By Paul Boag Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look” />

Are all of your meta description tags ~155 characters or less? Meta description tags over this will be truncated in results.

Internal linking: Are you linking to your internal pages in an SEO-friendly way? Are you describing the page you’re linking to in the anchor text, so that both users and search engines understand what it’s about? I recommend not using anchor text in your global navigation because it can look like over-optimization. Stick to in-content links instead.

Off-page SEO: Have you started off-page optimization and began building links? This is the hardest, most important aspect of SEO!

Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarking sites like Reddit can get you a huge wave of traffic if you get vote ups. Create an account with the below sites and become an active member of the community, then when you launch your site, ask for some feedback on the below sites.

Add Website to Email Signature

If you use a browser for emails, check out WiseStamp for Chrome and Firefox. Alternatively, NEWOLDSTAMP is another tool that can help you create a professional email signature within minutes. The service allows you to insert a link to your website, include another link to a recent blog post or add a promotional banner with the launch announcement.

These website launch tips are just what you need to make sure that the first impression your new website makes is the right one. We wish you the best of luck with your new site launch.

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on your website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for you. After creating the file, upload it to your root directory so that its location is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

If you use WordPress, install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which automatically updates the sitemap when you write new posts. Also, add your website and sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This tells Google that you have a sitemap, and the service provides useful statistics on how and when your website was last indexed.

Analytics Tracking

Installing a web analytics tool (like Google Analytics) is critical for recording and measuring website performance and conversion rates. Google Analytics even has a handy feature for setting up goals to track how much each conversion is worth for your business.

If you’re in the process of building a replacement for an existing website, be sure not to pollute your data by installing the tracking code on your new website while it’s under development. Equally, however, if you’re clever enough to leave out the tracking code, then be clever enough to remember it when it’s time to go live.

Code Validation

This is something that you would hope to have worked into your development process, but hey, if you subscribe to Murphy’s Law then this is probably something you should check before launch, and after each update.

The W3 Validator is a free tool from The W3C that will help you make sure your code is up to scratch.

Free Formatter has a list of a few more validation tools for different technologies.

Page Redirection

If you’re in the process of building a replacement website, it’s likely that pages on the new website don’t exist on the old website – and perhaps even the other way around. Sometimes, however, it’s just that the link structure is different. Whatever the case, it’s important to be thorough.

http://example.com/about-usis not the same ashttp://example.com/about_us.

Step One: Indexing

Open up this handy Google Spreadsheet (“Page Redirection Sheet“). This will help you index and compare old and new pages.

On each row, give every page a name (for easy reference). Then, list out all of your old pages and try to group them by page category (as in the example). Once you’re done, go through your new website and pair up the old pages with equivalent new pages.

If a page on the new website has a different URL to its equivalent page on the old website, then highlight the row in yellow for easy reference.

Step Two: Redirecting

Once you’ve finished indexing your site in the spreadsheet, open up the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website.

Since you’ve already indexed your site using the spreadsheet, simply locate your highlighted rows and use one of the following redirection rules (one per line):

301 Redirects

Use 301 redirects when you want to permanently redirect the old page to the new page. Example:
Redirect 301 http://www.example.com/about-us/ http://www.example.com/about_us/

302 Redirects

Use 302 redirects when you want to temporarily redirect the old page to the new page. Example:
Redirect http://www.example.com/about-us/ http://www.example.com/about_us/

Transactional Email Delivery

Test your emails are coming through from your various contact and signup forms

Monitoring Setup

No matter how good your infrastructure, sites crash. A site-monitoring service can inform you before your customers do.

Back Up

If your website runs off a database, you need a backup strategy. Or else, the day will come when you regret not having one. If you use WordPress, install WordPress Database Backup, which you can set up to automatically email yourself backups

BONUS: Backups are tested.

Doing backups is useless if you never test them. Too many people miss this obvious step when they set up their backups.

Graceful Degradation

Your website should work with JavaScript turned off.

Users often have JavaScript turned off for security, so you should be prepared for this. You can easily turn off JavaScript in Firefox.

Test your forms to make sure they still perform server-side validation checks and test any cool AJAX stuff you have going on.

RSS Link

If your website has a blog or newsreel, you should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. Users should be able to easily find your RSS feed: the common convention is to put a small RSS icon in the browser’s address bar.

28 Comments

Brilliant compilation Vinay. Your hard work is visible on this article, really appreciable effort.
Really good list to check on before launching a site or blog. I couldn’t find anything extra other than the structured data which I think is really important these days and could have been included in this list.
I am going to bookmark this webpage for future references and also sending this to my peers and followers. Will be looking forward for more like this.

The list is great. This blog will help lots of people to launch their own website in no time. Generating your own site and gaining more knowledge for you to create your very own website. I hope many people will read this blog.

It is really important that you create your checklist in launching a new website. Make sure that you meet everything in it before you make your site available in the online world. This is the best way to start success for your business/blog.

I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the structure of
your site? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better.
Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or 2 images.
Maybe you could space it out better?

Hey Kimberly! Glad you liked it. We’ve recently released four web maintenance checklists (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) that have the same effect as this checklist, but break it down into time-based recurring chunks: https://www.process.st/web-maintenance/